My old friend the Law of Unintended Consequences

My views on matters relating to what I may have been heard referring to as "Climate Change bollocks" are fairly clear, but I'm always on the lookout for the new and innovative ways the behaviour-enforcement gestapo look to twist the screw - or at least try to get their manifesto in place before the coming cooling phase makes us all realise it was just natural fluctuation.

For all that, I am keen on the environment (small e), and believe in stuff like minimising the use of natural resources, energy efficiency, technology, recycling and the like. So this sounded like an interesting story - the amount of power (in watts) generated during exercise is displayed on most of the machines at the gym, so can some of those watts be translated into a means of providing some of the power requirements. Seems like the technology getting to the point where it can deliver, and in a few years it may be commercially viable - although like the "where do we get wind power from if it's not windy" conundrum, "how do we power the gym on the days where everyone's being a slob" might be an issue.

But then they had to spoil it by going on about being a "carbon-neutral gym". Now, as a fan of the law of unintended consequences, I think they might have a problem. Much as some people would like us to forget it, CO2 is produced naturally by respiration. And after an hour at the gym, my respiration levels are what could kindly be described as "significantly raised". So I went off and did some checking on the levels of CO2 emissions for different activity levels, and found this:

Sleep - 25 grams per hour

Inactive - 40 g/h

Normal work - 200 g/h (middle of range)

Intensive exercise - 700 g/h (middle of range)

Which suggests that we gym-goers are producing something like seventeen times as much CO2 whilst exercising than we would if we just sat on our arses watching the telly. Or, in my case, nearly 30 times more than having an extra hour in bed before going to work. 

So, in the case of our worthy friends, by actually going to the gym in the first place, they're generating a significantly extended carbon footprint to worry about. Wonder how that fits into the carbon-neutral calculation...